alexgartrell

  render("{a} is all that I've {a}", {'a' : 'b'});
  "b is all that I've b"
  render("{a} is all that I've {{a}}", {'a' : 'b'});
  SyntaxError: Unexpected token {

Obviously the title was a little ridiculous, but I up-voted it, because it's a novel idea. If you're planning to have almost all of your static assets hosted from the CDN (which is pretty reasonable for almost everyone) then why bother with a super high-throughput low-latency web server if the only purpose is to occasionally refill the CDN? If you end up thrashing the CDN and constantly going back to refill it, you're going to have bigger problems.

From what I can tell, the rest of your comment is just super aggressive and doesn't really go anywhere. I will tell you that I have extensive experience with every piece you've mentioned here, and none of that really has any effect on the author's thesis (again, no need to optimize serving static content from your host if a CDN is going to do the legwork).

In general though, when someone works at Mozilla, I tend to give them the benefit of the doubt regarding their knowledge of elementary computing principles.

The performance declination argument is bullshit. Network's a million [0] times slower than gzip.

Truth be told, once you're on the network, you're already screwed w.r.t. most serialization. The only thing efficient compression/decompression is going to buy you is lower CPU (memcached servers run at like 2% CPU util, even under heavy load [1]).

Memcache at Facebook actually uses the ascii protocol, and the memcached implementation is a braindead strtok parser (some of our other stuff uses ragel -- you'll have a hell of a time out optimizing ragel with the right compiler flags -- I've tried and failed).

Just use whichever serialization format has the best API, because I can say with near certainty that it's not going to be a perf problem for you if you're touching disk, network, etc.

[0] Obviously a made up number, but it's way slower. Especially if you're unlucky and lose a packet or something.

[1] With the exception of weird kernel spin lock contention issues, which can happen if you're not sharding your UDP packets well and trying to reply from 8+ cores on 1 UDP socket. You probably aren't.

Working on encryption software : Being questioned at the border !:: Wearing a bikini : getting raped.

It's a lazy argument and he was right to point it out.

I attribute the 24/7 lockdown stuff to people who wear it as a badge of honor (that's exactly how Carnegie Mellon was, at least).

[1] http://watir.com/

Linux is used everywhere, but it's also paid for. If it weren't paid for, it wouldn't be used everywhere.

There are very few viable, large-scale open source projects that are run on developer free time alone.

With custom compression, where there's a will there's generally a way :)

Browsers are increasingly become a dynamic language runtime attached to a powerful graphics rendering library. Make the runtime faster, provide better graphics widgets, and get past this "remote everything with shitty local caching" thing and you've got yourself one hell of a toolkit.

I thought it was a cool article.

The problem is part of a larger one, people seem to be generally more interested in pithy, memorable one liners than in starting a discussion -- the easiest way to do this is to say something vitriolically sarcastic. People who agree with you will up-vote you, and you'll get some measure of affirmation from that.

The issue with that approach is that Hacker News should be a place where discussion flourishes. If the parent had said something to the effect of "This presents a troublesome, albeit interesting, avenue for further data aggregation, which could be used to target ads or sold to third parties," it would have likely kicked off an interesting discussion (both about the feasibility of such data aggregation (computer vision, mobile aggregation, etc.) and the societal costs of allowing such aggregation).

Instead, he went for the funny one-hitter, which framed the debate in such a way (by suggesting that it was inevitable and going to be used for evil) that anyone with even a slightly differing opinion is prevented from saying anything.

I don't mean to single out mechanical_fish specifically, many people here are guilty of this, but it essentially makes Hacker News more of an announcement/sharing forum (like twitter) than a discussion forum, which was one of the things that attracted me (and I'm sure many others) to it in the first place.

So I guess my larger point is that we should be more mindful of this stuff. It's more important to frame a relevant discussion than it is to "be right," and we should embrace that by posing interesting questions and answering them deliberately (being careful to stick to facts and being careful with the speculation, which easily morphs into FUD).

I'm not trying to hate on the post at all, I think it's awesome that product people are thinking about this problem, and the more of them that do the better the world is going to be for guys like me. I just want them to continue to think hard about it :)

So is it more likely that Google is filled with idiots that can't see the err of their ways, or that, across tens of thousands of individual hires, this is the most cost effective and produces the best results (minimizing false positives) on average.

College-admissions style interviewing just doesn't make sense for a company like Google.

FWIW, there are a couple edge cases (like javascript/frontend engineers) which my company (Facebook) has completely separate hiring tracks for. It works for us, but I'm sure Google has its own reasons for not doing that.

So why is this completely unrelated activity so important for measuring football players? Because it takes ten seconds to measure, and a guy who can run a 4.2 forty can almost always play pretty damn well.

Tech interviews today are a low cost way of getting a rough idea of ability to code. Judging from Google's output, it's pretty damn effective for them.

If amazon can build it, Google can build it.

For the majority of users, Facebook/Twitter results are more relevant than Google Plus results. There's nothing in the rule book that says you can't leverage a successful property to promote another, but it's unfair to everyone to try to pass that off as a move to increase relevance in search results.

Disclaimer: I'm a Facebook engineer who doesn't take SPYW personally.

As a counterpoint though, I would argue that Google Chrome using Google services (seemingly exclusively) for its sync functionality kind of looks like a business decision more so than experimentation with poorly defined standards.

In my opinion, this is great. I think Mongrel2 is an excellent proof-of-concept, and if it provided the impetus for a much more widely used project like nginx to go down a similar path (though it's just a module right now), then everyone wins.

That said, this certainly isn't in nginx mainline, and it's very feature poor as compared to Mongrel2. One could not simply swap in nginx with this module for an existing Mongrel2 installation.